Sheraton Indianapolis City Centre Hotel — Hotel in Indianapolis

I will cut to the chase before going into detail. This hotel uses a parking management company (PMC) that will deny theft claims. And there is a strong likelihood your car will be broken into if valeted here. This was told to me word for world from the valet manager “we’ve been experiencing a lot of break ins”.

They will then drag out their claims process and then they will deny any theft claim, even if it is likely their fault. So until this hotel does away with its partnership with PMC Parking, absolutely do not step foot here if you are parking a car. I was going to reserve my very bad public review after the hotel at least gave me some points for the overall really bad stay, but this claim denial really irked me.

Now on to my hotel experience. When I got there I was told a suite I had reserved was not ready. They said my room, or at least the room I was under the impression of having, was being cleaned and to use another room while I waited. This was not ideal but also not awful. We got ready in this room and took our 2 year old son to the outdoor pool (which is the very reason we selected this hotel over JW).

When we got to the pool, an 80 degree sunny day, we found it was closed. We eventually learned the hotel was not testing the water and the pool was closed. When they went to test it they found their chlorine kit had expired (shows how often they use that). This had me pretty angry.

Upon going back to the front desk then, I found they had no suites for me. So as to not sound like some jerk, a suite was important since I had my son (in a pack and play) and mother in law in tow. They told me they already upgraded me though to a small corner room. At that point it was apparent they never had my correct information which was a suite and they were in complete denial until I showed them a screenshot of my reservation with a suite.

At this point a team of 3 aimlessly clicked through a computer, presumably buying time to figure out what to do, until they gave me “someone else’s” suite. I would argue it was mine though? They also told me to disregard the tray snacks in the room which I kind of just found funny.

So at this point a couple hours of back and forth caused us to blow through any time we had for our son to get a decent nap. We then went to St Elmo’s for dinner (great place if you have a well napped kid), where he erupted in tears for being tired, leading us to just take our food to go.

Fast forward to the morning, I went to get our car only to have the valets take literally an hour to get it, presumably because they knew it was broken after being privy to a convo the valet had with the manager when he went to get it.

Once he returned we found the center console ransacked and the valet stacked it all up on the seat to make it look slightly less bad. $600 in items stolen.

Total compensation for this experience was 80K points. Of approx 30 Marriott/ Sheraton properties visited this year, and many more over the past decade, this was certainly the worst experience ever had. Now emailing the Indiana states attorney to investigate the parking company and reiterating to the health department how poorly run this property is so maybe that will give me some...

They forgot lots of basic items for our rooms. We just got to our room after a long day and were excited to watch TV but the remote was missing! We had to call down to get a new one and after that it worked fine. The second thing that annoyed me was that there was no shampoo in our shower. Since our group needed two rooms, there were two separate bathrooms. In the other bathroom there was no lotion. The rooms were not connected so we had to walk through the hallway to get things from each other so when I made the call down for more soaps, I had to also ask for items for the second room because we basically had to be fully dressed to walk to the other room in case we needed something from there. The third thing I did not like was that we had to request room cleaning. I get that COVID changed the way the hotel’s services are run, but my expectations remain the same. We didn’t need our whole room cleaned so we called down for only six new towels. The service was so slow that we had to leave instead of wait for the towels to come. When we came back, the towels were not dropped off and there were no new ones inside so we had to call down again to get the towels. After what seemed like forever, we finally got our towels delivered, only to find out there were only five! This meant there were two people in our group who had to share one. Very disappointing. However, the most disappointing of all, was the pool being “closed”. There were thunderstorms so we had to ask if the pool was still open and the front desk said it wasn’t. When we looked out of a window down to the pool, it was full with other people! We were told we couldn’t be out there but lots of others were still out there anyway. Even if the pool was in fact closed, they did not close the pool so people were still able to swim in the dangerous weather. This made me worry for the safety of the other guests because not only was it during a storm, but the hotel did not stick to their rules and close it at nine. The last thing I need to mention is the breakfasts. They are extremely overpriced so if you are looking for a nice breakfast place, I recommend First Watch, which is really close by. Starbucks is also only a block or two away. Other than that, the hotel was in a nice location and the view from the 21st floor ballroom was good.

Edit: We just went into the lobby bathrooms and they were DISGUSTING. Soap was all over the floor and sinks. Inappropriate words and things were smeared across the mirrors. Some people in our group waited until they could use our room’s bathroom because of how unsanitary the lobby...

They are trying to upgrade this place, but it has suffered from years of shoddy maintenance and neglect. This 21-story building went up in the late 1960s and is showing all of its age.

We were there in the winter and it was so cold in the room there was ice on the inside of the windows. A card in the room instructed guests to leave the blackout curtains closed in the summer all day so that the room wouldn't be so hot. Time to fix the windows was before you had those instructions printed and laminated.

The bathroom had been renovated so badly that there was no way for the toilet lid to stay open unless you were sitting down. Folks who stand to pee need to hold the lid open while doing so. There was not enough water pressure in the shower to rinse the shampoo out of my hair.

Cheap doors and thin walls make sure you can hear every conversation in the hallway even when people are being considerately quiet.

Surfaces in our room were nicely clean, but walking on the carpet made my white socks look like I had been walking through a field of coffee grounds. Closer inspection showed crusty grime in all the traffic areas. The dark grey color of the carpet hid this at first glance.

The public spaces had obviously been redecorated recently, but the workmanship was so shoddy that everything looked sad and tired. Nice wallpaper was hung on crooked, lumpy walls. Nice tile was installed on floors that had not been leveled. The Panorama Lounge on the 21st floor is a great space in theory, but we had no view as the ancient windows had all fogged and iced over.

The attached parking structure is so filthy and dark that my husband would not let me go there alone even in the middle of the day. I'm a seasoned traveler and I felt very uncomfortable in this place. Elevators can only be accessed by crumbling concrete stairs in many places, so if you are rolling a heavy bag you are out of luck. Also if you drive a truck, van or large SUV you will need to park elsewhere as the ceiling clearance is 7'4".

The staff worked hard and were friendly, but I had to go back to the hotel in the middle of a busy day because the reservations system had checked me out with 2 days left in my stay. This meant I had to stand in a line at the height of check in traffic and then come back again to have new keys made when the new set did not work. I was late to a meeting because of this and it was very...